Chapter VI

It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to wander from one corner of Florence to another, paying one's respects again to remembered masterpieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory had played no tricks, and that the beautiful things of an earlier year were as beautiful as ever. To enumerate these beautiful things would take a great deal of space; for I never had been more struck with the mere quantity of brilliant Florentine work. Even giving up the Duomo and Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin as very ill-arranged edifices, the list of the Florentine treasures is almost inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries of the Uffizi had never seemed to me more delectable; sometimes there were not more than two or three figures standing there, Baedeker in hand, to break the charming perspective. One side of this upstairs-portico, it will be remembered, is entirely composed of glass; a continuity of old-fashioned windows, draped with white curtains of rather primitive fashion, which hang there till they acquire a perceptible "tone." The light, passing through them, is softly filtered and diffused; it rests mildly upon the old marbles--chiefly antique Roman busts--which stand in the narrow intervals of the casements. It is projected upon the numerous pictures that cover the opposite wall, and that are not by any means, as a general thing, the gems of the great collection; it imparts a faded brightness to the old ornamental arabesques upon the painted wooden ceiling, and it makes a great soft shining upon the marble floor, in which, as you look up and down, you see the strolling tourists and the motionless copyists almost reflected. I don't know why I should find all this very pleasant, but, in fact, I have seldom gone into the Uffizi without walking the length of this third-story cloister, between the (for the most part) third-rate pictures and the faded cotton curtains. Why is it that in Italy we see a charm in things in regard to which in other countries we always take vulgarity for granted? If in the city of New York a great museum of the arts were to be provided, by way of decoration, with a species of verandah inclosed on one side by a series of small-paned windows, draped in dirty linen, and furnished on the other with an array of pictorial feebleness, the place being surmounted by a thinly-painted wooden roof, strongly suggestive of summer heat, of winter cold, of frequent leakage, those amateurs who had had the advantage of foreign travel would be at small pains to conceal their contempt. Contemptible or respectable, to the judicial mind, this quaint old loggia of the Uffizi admitted me into twenty chambers where I found as great a number of ancient favourites. I do not know that I had a warmer greeting for any old friend than for Andrea del Sarto, that most touching of painters who is not one of the first. But it was on the other side of the Arno that I found him in force, in those dusky drawing-rooms of the Pitti Palace, to which you take your way along the tortuous tunnel that wanders through the houses of Florence, and is supported by the little goldsmiths' booths on the Ponte Vecchio. In the rich, insufficient light of these beautiful rooms, where, to look at the pictures, you sit in damask chairs and rest your elbows on tables of malachite, Andrea del Sarto becomes peculiarly effective. Before long you feel a real affection for him. But the great pleasure, after all, was to revisit the earlier masters, in those specimens of them chiefly that bloom so unfadingly on the big, plain walls of the Academy. Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi are the sweetest and best of all painters; as I sat for an hour in their company, in the cold great hall of the institution I have mentioned--there are shabby rafters above and an immense expanse of brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as good ones--it seemed to me more than ever that if one really had to choose one could not do better than choose here. You may sit very quietly and comfortably at the Academy, in this big first room--at the upper end, especially, on the left--because more than many other places it savours of old Florence. More for instance, in reality, than the Bargello, though the Bargello makes great pretensions. Beautiful and picturesque as the Bargello is, it smells too strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still lurks in its furbished and renovated chambers, it speaks even more distinctly of the ill-mannered young kingdom that has (as unavoidably as you please) lifted down a hundred delicate works of sculpture from the convent-walls where their pious authors placed them. If the early Tuscan painters are exquisite, I can think of no praise generous enough for the sculptors of the same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo Civitale and Mino da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of purity of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello is full of early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have come from suppressed convents; and even if the visitor be an ardent liberal, he is uncomfortably conscious of the rather brutal process by which it has been collected. One can hardly envy young Italy the number of disagreeable things she has had to do.

The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the better and for the worse; for the better, in that it has been shortened by a couple of hours; for the worse, inasmuch as, when about half the distance has been traversed, the train deflects to the west, and leaves the beautiful old cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. Of old, it was possible to visit these places, in a manner, from the window of the train; even if you did not stop, as you probably could not, every time you passed, the picturesque fashion in which, like a loosened belt on an aged and shrunken person, their old red walls held them easily together was something well worth noting. Now, however, by way of compensation, the express-train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in consequence... In consequence what? What is the consequence of an express train stopping at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote that sentence I suddenly paused, with a sense of the queer stuff I was uttering. That an express train would graze the base of the horrid purple mountain from the apex of which this dark old Catholic city uplifts the glittering front of its cathedral--that might have been foretold by a keen observer of contemporary manners. But that it would really have the grossness to stop there, this is a fact over which, as he records it, a sentimental chronicler may well make what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does stop at Orvieto, not very long, it is true, but long enough to let you out. The same phenomenon takes place on the following day, when, having visited the city, you get in again. I availed myself of both of these occasions, having formerly neglected to drive to Orvieto in a post-chaise. And really, the railway-station being in the plain, and the town on the summit of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget all about the triumphs of steam, while you wind upwards to the city-gate. The position of Orvieto is superb; it is worthy of the "middle distance" of a last-century landscape. But, as every one knows, the beautiful cathedral is the proper attraction of the place, which, indeed, save for this fine monument, and for its craggy and crumbling ramparts, is a meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not particularly impressive little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there, and I looked at the charming church. I looked at it a great deal--a great deal considering that on the whole I found it inferior to its fame. Intensely brilliant, however, is the densely carved front; densely covered with the freshest-looking mosaics. The old white marble of the sculptured portions is as softly yellow as ancient ivory; the large, exceedingly bright pictures above them flashed and twinkled in the splendid weather. Very beautiful and interesting are the theological frescoes of Luca Signorelli, though I have seen pictures that struck me as more attaching. Very enchanting, finally, are the clear-faced saints and seraphs, in robes of pink and azure, whom Fra Angelico has painted upon the ceiling of the great chapel, along with a noble sitting figure--more expressive of movement than most of the creations of this pictorial peace-maker--of Christ in judgment. But the interest of the cathedral of Orvieto is mainly not the visible result, but the historical process that lies behind it; those three hundred years of devoted popular labour of which an American scholar has written an admirable account.[1]

[Footnote 1: Charles Eliot Norton: _Study and Travel in Italy._]